Defying all conventions, Jerry Brown's redemption as a politician began on the gritty streets of Oakland.

After 16 years in the political wilderness, the former governor turned to a down-on-its-luck city in an attempt to restore the luster -- both to Oakland and to his own moribund political career.

Here, he would prove himself willing to work with the captains of capital, drawing businesses to a city they long had shunned. Here, he would remake his image on crime: The same man who appointed staunch death penalty foe Rose Bird to the state's Supreme Court was now working closely with law enforcement to curb the so-called Murder Capital's crime rate.

He sold a brand of reconciliation, settling into his own downtown living quarters in this overwhelmingly minority city of 400,000.

Even measured against the many unconventional twists and turns of Brown's whirlwind political life, this was one of his more intriguing career choices. It turned out to be a wise one, and it now has him again at the doorstep of the governor's office after serving one term as state attorney general.

"By adopting a more law-and-order, redevelopment, conventional orientation, it showed Jerry was not 'Governor Moonbeam' any more," said Bruce Cain, director of the UC Washington Center in the nation's capital. "He was getting marginalized out of the mainstream of California politics. Getting back into office, and doing it in a pragmatic way, was a critical point in his career."

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His eight years as Oakland's mayor -- from 1999 to 2007 -- provide a glimpse of the contemporary Brown, a gauge of his political persona more updated than the grainy black-and-white imagery of his previous incarnation as governor.

Whether Oakland got the change Brown promised has already become an issue in the gubernatorial race. His Republican opponent, Meg Whitman, has attacked him for rising salaries and pension benefits among city employees, as well as what some say was his failure to reform Oakland's troubled schools.

He may have updated his image, but critics say he remained the same lofty-ideas guy with a short attention span.

Supporters counter that Brown's tenure was more than a ledger accounting for promises kept or unmet. The city, forever in the shadow of glittery San Francisco, was happy to have a celebrity mayor in its midst. He could commonly be seen, without an entourage or bodyguards, chatting folks up around town, listening to their concerns as he walked his dog Dharma.

He even ran for mayor as an independent, having left the Democratic Party, blasting what he called the "deeply corrupted" two-party system.

Crowning achievement

Brown, who defeated 10 other candidates with 59 percent of the vote, jumped out of the gate early in his first term, persuading voters to adopt a "strong-mayor" form of government that gave him the power to veto legislation and hire and fire department heads.

He used that authority to push through his vision of developing downtown residential properties to attract 10,000 new residents. Previously dilapidated homes were renovated, and unused commercial buildings were converted into hip residential lofts.

It is an open question whether those units have ever been fully occupied, though observers say the national economy has had more to do with slowing progress than anything Brown did.

Nonetheless, it was a pro-business policy that reigned, and $1 billion of investments poured in as major attractions such as Jack London Square, the Port of Oakland and the Fox Theater gained needed refurbishing and expansion.

Brown used his influence, political savvy and long-established relationships with business leaders to lure investors at the height of the dot-com boom. He moved projects through the maze of bureaucratic hurdles and environmental regulations quicker than any of his predecessors -- and to the chagrin of his pro-environment friends.

"His two terms will be viewed definitely as the start of the revitalization of Oakland," said City Councilman Ignacio De La Fuente, who ran against Brown in 1998 but wound up as a strong City Hall ally. "Everybody was leaving town. It was important to get people to start coming back."

Disappointments

Yet many believe he failed to color in the outlines of his vision.

Brown first campaigned on the promise of "fixing" Oakland's schools, cracking down on crime, restoring the arts and revitalizing downtown.

"The real victory will come when people feel so safe that they take the window bars off their windows and they move to Oakland to enroll their kids in school," he said after winning in 1998.

But when Brown could not persuade the school board to agree with his choice for superintendent, he and then-state Senate leader Don Perata engineered the 2004 state takeover of the school system, which was operating under a $100 million deficit.

Whitman's campaign has said the state takeover proves Brown failed in his promise to reform Oakland's schools. Other critics say he gave up after losing the bureaucratic battle.

"He lost interest," said Dan Siegel, a former Oakland school board member. "It was disappointing."

Brown now says he never had control over the schools and that he shouldn't take the blame. But, as mayor, he conceded his school reform platform was "largely a bust," and he turned his focus to the creation of two charter schools, the Oakland School for the Arts and the Oakland Military Institute.

Tough on crime?

Likewise, Brown may have been naive or just promoting an overly hopeful brand of crime control when he said on his first day as mayor: "By the time we're finished, there will be a lot less crime in Oakland than there is in Walnut Creek."

He didn't come close, but crime did drop for most of his time in office. There were 36,916 crimes reported in town in 1998, the year before Brown became mayor; by 2006, that number had declined 13 percent. Brown tried a variety of crime-fighting strategies, including a curfew for parolees to prevent late-night violence.

By the time he left office in 2007, Oakland's police force was 803 strong, a 25 percent increase from 1998 -- though the effort to hire and retain officers was a struggle for the entirety of Brown's tenure.

Any tough-on-crime claim Brown could make, however, was blunted by a 57 percent spike in homicides his final year in office, to 148. Criminals, Brown said in a moment of frustration, "are running rampant."

Yet his opponents in the 2006 race for attorney general failed to convince voters that Brown was responsible for the increased crime.

Where the results over eight years could be seen as mixed, Brown's stature in Oakland mirrors that of his entire career, observers say: He has always gained from the cult of personality that surrounds him and the sense of nostalgia that goes back to the reign of his father, Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, as governor in the '60s.

He fell short in many ways but remains a favorite, said Jean Quan, a city councilwoman now running for mayor against Brown's choice, Perata.

"He wound up with a very narrow agenda of charter schools and downtown development," Quan said. "For a lot of people, that was enough. As I walk door-to-door, people want to talk about Jerry. He's remembered very fondly."

Contact Steven Harmon at 916-441-2101.

JERRY Brown AS MAYOR

What Brown did during his two terms as mayor of Oakland from 1999 to 2007:

Business: Attracted investment while pushing major redevelopment projects.Schools: Started two charter schools, but concedes reform platform was "largely a bust."Crime: Managed to hire more police officers and cut crime during his term, but murders spiked in his last year in office.